"A couple years later, this Director’s Cut comes out, and my wife Bianca decides to give it a shot. I watch her a bit as she takes her time, surveys the land, decides on the best path forward, and generally just kind of takes things in and takes her time with the game."
Mass Effect is my favorite gaming series of all time and watching this and experiencing the series again with Alex has been an absolute blast.
It is kinda super shitty though that Brad, Vinny or the chat didn't tell Alex to stop so he could actually sit back and think about his choice. Honestly can't believe they just let it go like that. Super sucks when you've invested so much time into something and then have the final choice come out like that.
Don't put this on chat. We were all yelling at him to stop moving, lol. It's the fastest I've ever seen chat move on this site. That said, it didn't bother me all that much. All three endings are kind of shit, just would have liked to have seen Alex come to his own conclusion.
Either way the journey of Mass Alex, just like the journey of Mass Effect, has been overwhelmingly great. I'm going to greatly miss this series and really hope they subject themselves to Andromeda to see that 1. It isn't as bad as people make it out to be, and 2. It's not a good Mass Effect game.
@therealturk: The story is pretty bad, especially halfway through ME2. But that meme is the kind of trashy, flippant social media snark that has become endemic to every discussion now.
What makes the Leviathan reveal so compelling is that up to that point all you know about the Reapers is from what they have told you about themselves, or what the Protheans passed on through Vigil, the memory obelisks, and Javik. They've built themselves up to be "beyond human comprehension".
Then their creators out themselves as cowardly, petty fat-cats who ruled the galaxy as slavers by enthralling other species against their will. That elitist arrogance and brutality was their downfall. They only created the reapers to keep their slaves from destroying themselves before they could be used to satisfy the Leviathans' whims. It was never about preserving sentient organic life. The Leviathans obviously didn't want their thralls thinking for themselves. It was a maintenance cycle to keep their crops in check.
All the bravado and chest-thumping about unknowable Lovecraftian intelligence was just puffery inherited from a bunch of shitty lords who couldn't be bothered to maintain their own empire. They had to contract it out to a kill squad that predictably went rogue on them, but they were too high on their self-proclaimed exceptionalism to see it. It's a total subversion of expectation but it makes perfect sense.
Thessia sets this up perfectly if you take the time to let Javik debunk Liara and the Asari's creation myth.
You can argue it's silly or doesn't "work" but it's not nearly as dumb as whoever came up with that fucking ancient xzibit image macro.
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No contest, do the Citadel DLC before the Cerberus base and final mission. The whole point is that it's one last blowout party before the end of everything.
Everything you said is well put.
I feel like if I were going to do a continuation of the story of Mass Effect as it's left at the end of 3 I would write whatever nonsense I needed to to handwave the Reapers away, and build up Leviathans as the next threat. With the Reapers no longer a threat there's a power vacuum that they could want to refill - to reclaim their lost empire. They could similarly start mucking with the Krogan or using other races to provoke a war to continue to weaken rebuilding efforts while they enact their spread.
It's fertile ground. It's too bad they felt the need to go the direction they did with Andromeda (which I also liked, but it just wasn't the same). But it's ground they can still come back to.
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